Thicker than Water Read online

  The wooden pews spread forward in perfect rows, two rows for each of the Stations of the Cross plaques hanging along the walls. I sat down for a moment, just to breathe, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I was still too scared and too angry. I got up and walked over to the confessional and opened the door. I knelt at the window.

  “Hello? Anybody there?” I asked.

  A rustling noise came from the other side of the mesh window. “Yes, I’m here.” It was Father Bingham. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said he had fallen asleep waiting for sinners.

  “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned,” I said.

  “And what sins do you wish to confess?”

  “Well … Father, forgive me, for I am not Catholic.”

  Silence. Then, finally, “Forgiven,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “Oh, Father,” I said, “I have made such a mess of things.”

  Surprisingly, he didn’t push me. He didn’t treat the confessional like an assembly line for sinners. He sat patiently and waited for me to speak.

  “I … Father, it’s Torie. Can I see your face?”

  “Certainly,” he said. I heard him open the door and come around to the door on my room. He entered and sat down in the chair opposite the mesh window. I stood and then sat in the other chair. A small round table with a candle and some leaflets stood between us. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  I put my face in my hands. “I hate my mother-in-law. There, I said it. I despise the woman. She is so mean to me. She has hated me since the day she met me. She doesn’t think I’m good enough for Rudy. She thinks everything I do is trivial—well, it is sort of trivial, but that’s beside the point. She’s hateful, narcissistic, manipulative … she is poison, Father. Absolute poison.”

  He said nothing.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me what a terrible person I am?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I want her to go away and never come back. I literally don’t care if I ever see this woman again. I mean, I don’t want anything bad to happen to her, but I wish she’d go away. There’s just one problem. My husband happens to love his mother. which drives me insane because I don’t understand how he can love somebody who hates his wife.”

  “You want him to dislike her as much as you do?” he asked.

  “No, I just want him to choose me! I feel so betrayed, Father. If his mother was nice to me and I still hated her, that would be one thing. But she is evil. Pure evil. Satan lives in the follicles of her hair!”

  “Torie, really,” he said. “I think you’re overreacting a bit.”

  “Okay, fine, but you see my dilemma. The fact that Rudy still loves her and overlooks her offenses makes me feel like he doesn’t love me. I mean, how can you love somebody who hates your spouse?”

  “Some mothers have trouble letting go,” he said.

  “Bah! That’s a cop-out line if I ever heard one. You know from the minute you give birth to your children that you’re raising them to give to somebody else. If you don’t know that, then you’re in serious denial.”

  “Maybe she feels the same way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she feels like you hate her and she can’t understand how her son could possibly love somebody who hates his mother.”

  His suggestion stopped me dead, but it didn’t take me long to rally. “Yes, but I am not the one who insulted her first. She insulted me, to my face, the day we met!”

  “You’re a threat. Obviously.”

  “So that gives her the right to be so mean to me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, what are you saying, Father? Because so far, you’re not helping me much.”

  “Jesus said to love your enemies.”

  “Well, and thus you’ll notice I don’t listen to him too often.”

  “Torie,” he said and leaned forward, “where’s the humanity in loving those who love you? That’s the easy job. But loving those who do not love you is the true test of a humanitarian. A decent human being.”

  A tear rolled down my face before I could stop it.

  “You passed that test with Sylvia,” he went on.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sylvia was the most cantankerous, hateful woman who walked the streets of New Kassel and beyond,” he said. “Yet you loved her.”

  “That’s different,” I said and swiped at another tear.

  “How is it different?”

  “Because Sylvia was a good person underneath all of that gruff exterior. She helped people,” I said.

  “She also hurt people. She controlled people’s lives. Sylvia couldn’t stand for anybody to own any property in this town because then she couldn’t control what happened on it,” he said. “You know this. This is not news to you, Torie.”

  “No,” I said, refusing to listen.

  “She was overly critical of you. And of everybody. Yet you still loved her. You forgave her those things,” he said. “Why can’t you extend that same courtesy to your mother-in-law?”

  I was sobbing now. Tears rolled down my face faster than I could wipe them away. I felt like such a jerk.

  “Because you refuse to see your mother-in-law as a person. You refuse to look past it all to see the person underneath. Just as you looked past Sylvia’s shortcomings and found the good person—the person who gave to charity and left you everything—so you would find good things in your mother-in-law, too. And even if you didn’t, you should feel pity for her, Torie. Love her anyway. For she is much more miserable than you.”

  I sat listening to his words through my sniffling and sobbing. He handed me a Kleenex, and I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

  “Why did Sylvia have to leave me everything?” I asked.

  “Because you are strong,” he said. “If you weren’t, she would have left it to somebody else.”

  I chuckled at that. Oh, real strong. Sitting across from Father Bingham crying so hard my eyes were swollen and my Kleenex was soaked. Oh, exactly the person I’d leave a fortune and a world of responsibility to.

  “And because she loved you,” he said, “through all of the hatefulness and spitefulness. She managed to learn to love somebody other than herself and Wilma.”

  “Ooooh,” I said and began crying again.

  “There, there,” he said.

  “I feel like such a jerk,” I sobbed.

  “Don’t.”

  I took a deep breath and stood up. “Well, don’t I have to say a bunch of Hail Marys or something?”

  “No, that’s for club members only,” he said and smiled. His blue eyes twinkled. “Besides, your enlightenment is enough payment for the sin committed. Which is why we confess in the first place.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He stood then and surprised me by giving me a big hug. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “There is nobody I would trust this town to more than you.”

  “Thanks again,” I said. I stepped out of the confessional and out of the church into the purple of dusk. Now I had to go home and face Rudy and his mother. I had to go home sometime. Might as well be now.

  Twenty-Three

  As I was walking home, Colin pulled up in his sheriff’s car and flashed his lights at me. I stopped and waited for him to pull over. I was going to feel really foolish if Rudy had sent out Colin to find me. But as my stepfather stopped his car, the look on his face suggested this was business, or at least something far more serious than a worried husband. Immediately my mind flashed on Mike Walker being carried away on the stretcher.

  “Get in,” he said.

  I walked in front of his car to the passenger side and got in. “Anything on Walker?”

  “Surprisingly, they’re saying that he’s stabilized,” he said. His words sent a wave of relief through me. “He’s going to be in a world of hurt for a week at least. He lost a lot of blood and has a concussion and about eight broken bones, but evidently he has a fairly ha
rd head. I think he’s going to live.”

  “So you’re going to give up fishing?” I asked.

  “Not on your life.”

  “I knew you didn’t mean it,” I said.

  “No, that’s how convinced I was that he would die.”

  “You’re insufferable.”

  “I’ve got something to show you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “First, I need to tell you that Leigh Duran is in the hospital,” he said.

  Leigh had suffered several miscarriages, so that was the first thing that sprang to my mind, but as far as I knew she wasn’t pregnant. “What happened?”

  “She … tried to commit suicide.”

  “What?” I said. “Oh, that’s horrible. What about Duran?”

  “Obviously, I let him go to her,” he said.

  “No, I mean, is he all right?”

  “I guess that all depends how his wife is,” he said.

  “Is she … I mean, is she expected to live?”

  He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Does Duran … does he know why she tried to kill herself?”

  “I don’t know. But me personally, I think it’s over the miscarriages. She’s been pretty set on having a baby, and so far nothing has happened.”

  “I’ll wait a day or two before going to see her,” I said. “No reason for half the town to show up in the ER.”

  Colin pulled into a private driveway and turned around, then headed toward the outer road. He switched from concerned boss and friend to sheriff in nothing flat. “CSU couldn’t get any good footprints in the stairwell because they’d been traveled over so much. I mean, there’s plenty of prints in the dust, but not one clear print.”

  “Because the perp kept stepping over his own prints each time he used the stairwell?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “No prints on the panel, either.”

  “So what did you get?”

  He gave me a questioning look.

  “Well, you’re obviously taking me somewhere,” I said.

  “When the wooden stairs get to the basement, they turn into concrete.”

  “Okay…”

  “No prints on the concrete. And then the stairwell turns into a tunnel,” he said. He put on his blinker and made a turn. He looked over at me again. “Put your seat belt on.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. I did as he instructed. “You were saying something about a tunnel?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The stairwell doesn’t exit at the basement. In fact, there’s no access to the basement at all from the stairwell. It leads down and then to a tunnel and then out of the city.”

  “What?” I said, stunned. “Did you say it leads out of the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does it come out?”

  “It leads to an old cellar type of door on the other side of the creek. About six blocks from the Gaheimer House, just outside of town.”

  “Holy … but who the heck would build something that elaborate and why?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “As far as I know none of this is on the surveys of the city or the blueprints of the Gaheimer House. I’ll check again, though. Can we tell if it was built after the Gaheimer House was built, or was it part of the original construction?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just can’t believe nobody in this town knew about this.”

  Colin parked on the side of the road just outside of town by the creek. He motioned for me to get out, and I followed him. We walked for at least ten minutes along the creek, swatting at mosquitoes and insects as we went. It was nearly dark, although still light enough that we could see where we were going. Crickets and cicadas played their symphony so loud that at one point it seemed like just one loud roar in my ears. The trees were black against the bruised curtain of dusk, and the creek whished swiftly off to my right.

  A mosquito landed on my face and I smacked it. “I hate mosquitoes.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “If I get a tick on me, you’re dead,” I said. “Because you know, things that suck blood are just gross.”

  “We’ve had this discussion.”

  “I know.”

  “Hey, I coulda left you out of this,” he said. “You’d be missing something pretty cool.”

  “All right, all right,” I said.

  Finally we came to an old dilapidated building that looked a lot like a fishing shack. Colin shined the flashlight on the ancient construction. One wall was caved in, leaning on the other three. Underneath that leaning wall was enough room for somebody to disappear beneath the cellar doors in the floor.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “You want to go down and take a look?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Totally,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. He pulled open the cellar doors and descended some concrete steps. I followed. There were just enough stairs to make the tunnel about ten feet underground. Colin didn’t need to duck his head, but he did so anyway. I think he didn’t want anything dropping from the ceiling onto his hair. Who could blame him? A little way into the tunnel all light ceased to exist, save for the flashlight beam. The light seemed pretty thin and pretty weak, considering it was the only thing we had to keep us from bumping into walls that were barely eight feet apart and each other.

  The musty odor was nearly enough to make me vomit. “There’s enough mold down here to start my own penicillin lab.”

  “I thought they manufactured that synthetically nowadays,” Colin said.

  “Probably. What does that say about the twenty-first century? We have to synthetically grow fungus when it grows abundantly on its own.”

  I talked incessantly as long as Colin could stand it. I was far too nervous about being in a dark place with things that had hairy legs and fangs.

  “Torie, relax.”

  “Right.”

  “They found some rodent bones,” he said.

  “Oh, joy.”

  We kept walking for what seemed like eternity, but I knew it wasn’t. It doesn’t take that long to walk six blocks. Then we came to the wooden stairs that led up into Wilma’s old room. Colin stopped. “Right on that side of the wall is your basement.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said.

  “Pretty amazing, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was wondering if you could help me with this inscription.”

  “Inscription?”

  “Right here on the concrete wall.”

  My days be brighter

  Come the morn’

  Out of this shelter

  My life be born.

  P. B. 1862

  “Possibly, but I’d have to check a few things first.”

  “Really? I should have known.”

  Twenty-Four

  Half an hour later I was seated at my desk at the Gaheimer House wondering when and if I was ever going to get to go home. My head reeled with information, and it hurt because of all the gaps that I couldn’t fill in.

  Colin, Miller, and Newsome were walking through the Gaheimer House, talking on radios, taking measurements, and snapping pictures. Basically, I think they wanted me to feel that they were doing all they could to keep me safe. It was a sweet gesture if nothing else.

  I only wished the world would stop for an hour. Just one hour.

  The phone rang, and I answered it.

  “Torie, what in blazes is going on?” Rudy asked.

  “Long story,” I said. “The so-called ghost that Stephanie and I have been hearing has been using an access panel in a closet wall, which leads out of the house through a tunnel to outside of town.”

  “Say what?”

  “I know, surreal.”

  “Wait, did you know about this tunnel?”

  “No.”

  “Who could have known about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, at least
we know you weren’t hallucinating.”

  “I know.”

  Rudy was quiet a moment. “Look, about my mother—”

  “Rudy, don’t. We’ll talk about it when I get home,” I said. “I was a jerk.”

  “Y-you were?” he said. “I mean, you were. Really, Torie.”

  His tone was playful so I didn’t go all ballistic. “We’ll talk later.”

  “When later?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to help Colin figure out who could have known about the tunnel and who could have built it,” I said. “I’ll try not to be too late, but you may have to take the kids to school tomorrow.”

  “No biggie,” he said.

  We said our good-byes, and I stared at the phone for a moment after I placed it in its cradle. Taking a deep breath, I stretched and tried to mentally prepare myself for the long night ahead of me. I needed caffeine and sugar. In that order.

  No sooner had I had thought it than Colin walked in and handed me a Dr Pepper and Chinese takeout. “I’m assuming you haven’t eaten.”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. I looked at the clock on my desk. It was after 8:00 P.M.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think that sometime in the next hundred years the Blues will win the Stanley Cup.”

  “The tunnel. Come on.”

  “Let me ask you something first.”

  “What?” He took the containers of food out of the bag and placed them on my desk. Chinese food was something Colin and I did together. A little stepfather-stepdaughter activity, since my mother despised Chinese food and he never got to eat it otherwise. It showed that he was at least working on thinking of me as something other than a pain in the butt.

  “Do you think the same person who attacked Mike Walker attacked me?”

  His hands hovered above the crab rangoon. “I think it’s a very good possibility.”

  “Any reason why he would have attacked Mike?”